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The first presidential election since the Jan. 6 attack will test new congressional barriers.

The first presidential election since the Jan. 6 attack will test new congressional barriers.

WASHINGTON — This presidential election, the first since the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, will be a stress test of the new systems and barriers Congress has put in place to ensure America’s long tradition of peaceful transitions of presidential power.

As Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris near the finish line, democracy advocates and elected officials are bracing for an uncertain period after Election Day as lawsuits are filed, malicious actors spread disinformation and voters wait for Congress to certify the results.

“One of the unusual characteristics of this election is that so much of the potential danger and so many of the attacks on the election system are focused on the period after the election,” said Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the nonpartisan Brennan Center. for justice.

After the Jan. 6 attack, Congress moved to support the process and prevent a repeat of the unprecedented period in which Trump, joined by some GOP allies in Congress, refused to concede defeat to President Joe Biden. Trump spent months pushing through dozens of failed court cases before sending his supporters to the US Capitol, where they disrupted the vote count with a deadly riot. He faces federal charges in the scheme, which involved lists of fraudulent voters from states falsely claiming he won.

While the new Voting Reform Act passed by Congress brought clarity to post-election processes (to speed up resolution of legal challenges and to reinforce the fact that the vice president does not have the ability to change the results of the January 6 election), the new law is by no means iron.

Much depends on the people involved: from winning and losing presidents to elected leaders in Congress and voters across America who trust the democratic system that has existed for more than 200 years.

A poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that American voters are approaching the election with deep concerns about what might come next.

Dick Gephardt, a former House leader, now serves on the executive board of Save Our Republic, a nonpartisan organization that works to provide civic education about the process in the presidential battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

“We are concerned about one thing and one thing only: Can Americans continue to have real confidence in elections and can we achieve a consistent, peaceful transition of power in all positions, including the presidency?” Gephardt said this at a briefing earlier this month.

“I think Jan. 6, 2021, was really a wake-up call for all of us,” he said.

It’s not just the onslaught of legal challenges that worries Democratic groups, as dozens of lawsuits have already been filed by both Republicans and Democrats before Election Day. They say the sheer volume of cases can sow doubt about the election results and fuel disinformation both domestically and internationally, as happened in 2020 when Trump’s legal team advanced broad theories that turned out to be wildly inaccurate.

As Trump tries to retake the White House, he is already setting the stage for challenges in an election that he believes will be “too important to be rigged.” The Republican National Committee has made legal strategy a cornerstone of its election integrity agenda.

Trump is supported by Republicans on Capitol Hill, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has taken similar language, saying he will only accept the results if the election is free and fair.

“We’re going to have a peaceful transition of power,” Johnson, who led one of Trump’s 2020 lawsuits, told CBS. “I believe President Trump will win and this will be taken care of.”

One particular line of attack from House Republicans has been the assumption that noncitizens will cast illegal ballots, even though it is a crime and state and federal audits have shown it to be extremely rare. To reinforce his concerns, Johnson pointed to past House elections, including the 2020 Iowa race, which was won by six votes.

Rep. Joseph Morell of New York, the top Democrat on the House Management Committee, said Johnson was “saying the quiet part out loud,” signaling that Republicans could challenge the result.

That “worries me,” he said.

At the Brennan Center, they have developed war-game-like scenarios about what might happen after the election, at a time when state election officials face a resurgence of conspiracy theories and misinformation about voting.

A series of deadlines between Election Day on Nov. 5 and Inauguration Day on Jan. 20 are built into the process, once routine steps that are now major milestones that can be met—or missed.

States are required to certify their electors by Dec. 11 ahead of the Electoral College meeting, which is set for Dec. 17 this year.

The new Congress will convene Jan. 3 to elect a House speaker and swear in lawmakers. Then, on Jan. 6, Congress will meet in a joint session to decide on state election vote counts, a typically ceremonial session chaired by the vice president.

To strengthen this process in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack, the Election Count Reform Act made several changes designed to strengthen the process and ensure disputes are resolved by the time Congress meets. Legal challenges to the results should be resolved more quickly, with expedited deadlines for judicial review, all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. If a county refuses to certify its results, as some did during the 2022 midterm elections, the governor has more power to certify the state’s results.

On Jan. 6, the law now requires 20% of the House and Senate to challenge state electors to vote to reject them, rather than requiring one membership threshold from each chamber.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., who was the chief architect of the new law along with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said they did “everything we could” to protect the process.

“You know people have a right, if they have problems with an election, to go to court and have their voices heard,” Lofgren said. “The thing is, once this is over, it’s over.”